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A BRACE OF DEFINITIONS AND A SHORT CODE
THERE is a wholesome catholicity about the definition of the novel in The Concise Oxford: "fictitious prose narrative of sufficient length to fill one or more volumes, portraying char¬acters and actions representative of real life in continuous plot." The two components in this definition give it a width of angle inclusive of two easily distinguishable sorts of work. One of these relies upon the contrivance of its pattern for maintaining the read¬er's concern, the performers being more or less rigidly conventionalized types. The other appeals to this same concern through the authenticity of its characters and their experiences. In the currency of the day, it is the latter sort, the novel of character—the por¬trait rather than the decoration, which gets itself spoken of as "the novel" or "the serious novel." I am aware that I have taken con¬troversial ground in making a classi¬fication from the reader's point of view, for many of my younger col¬leagues will hardly admit that the reader exists, let alone postulate him as a relevant factor in the affair. In the light of the brilliant performances of some of these younger and newer novelists, one does well to think twice before taking issue with them upon an abstraction of this sort; but I have thought twice and more than twice, and to me the thing is funda¬mental. It seems to me that no act of crea¬tion, whether parthenogenetic or otherwise, is real unless it gives a valid objectivity to the created thing; sets it up by itself, on its own feet, and leaves it to walk alone, live its own life, weather its own storms. An act which doesn't result in the projection and detachment of an objective entity of some sort isn't a creative act at all but a mere self-satisfying gesture. The only objective existence a novel can have is through its readers, and, therefore, it is from the point of view of its readers that it must be judged. It must be judged by itself, without reference to its creator; it must have articulation enough in its own bones to enable it to stand alone, and vitality enough between its own covers to keep it alive. That's plain enough, I think, so far, but it leaves the novelist in a diffi¬culty; confronts him, anyhow, with a demand for a rather fine distinction. Does this objective theory of the novel imply a contact between the novelist and his reader? I believe it does, but I hasten to qualify this admission by saying that the only reader whose ap¬probation the novelist has any con¬cern with is himself. But himself as reader not as author. He must write what he likes, but he must make what he writes intelligible to a stranger whose likes and feelings and associa¬tion. qre similar to hl' Writing thus, for his alter ego, he gives himself, of course, dead away, and his courage in giving himself dead away is the measure of his seri¬ousness. If he writes up to a supe¬rior reader or down to an inferior reader, he is equally a snob and the truth is not in him. I'd like, with the wedge of another definition, to split once more the half log we have left. There are still two sorts of novel a man may write, deter¬mined not so much by the selection of his character material as by his atti¬tude toward that material. He may select unfamiliar types and make their unfamiliarity the attractive thing about them. He relies, if he does this, upon what a city editor would call the news value of his characters. He ac¬cents their distinctive speech, eti¬quette, point of view. If he does it plausibly, he gives his readers a sense, not always illusory either, of being in¬creased in worldly wisdom, of becom¬ing cosmopolites. At least they are personally conducted tourists, and, if the conductor knows his business, they have a wonderful time. They go back-stage; they visit western ranches, middle-western small towns, Holly¬wood, the Latin Quarter, India; they learn the distinctive slang of the chorus girl, the cowboy, the hick, the British subaltern and his Mrs. Hauxhee. It is possible, even in dealing with this unfamiliar material, to put the stress on the other foot, accenting and revealing not the surface strangeness of these aliens but their underlying common humanity. "Folks," Sinclair Lewis says very earnestly, "are folks. The hobo, the itinerant tailor and the hick, just as much as the college pro¬fessor, the business man and the soci¬ety woman." And conversely, of course—though I never have heard Mr. Lewis say this—the college pro¬fessor, the business man and the soci¬ety woman as much as the hobo, the tailor and the hick. So this question asks itself; why, if common humanity is a novelist's concern, should he go afield to look for it? The critical fashion of the day pro¬scribes the exceptional. Unless the novelist wishes to rest under the im¬putation of romanticizing, let him write about commonplace people, dull inarticulate earthbound people, and let him courageously make them as dull and inarticulate and earthbound as the majority of mankind admit¬tedly are. Let their deeds be still¬born and their conversation mere un¬grammatical adumbrations of their unrecognized desires. Is it heresy to ask whether this sort of thing is not tourist fiction just as the cowboy and chorus girl stuff is tourist fiction? Of course, nobody is a cowboy to himself, nor a chorus girl. Is any one a dull earthbound clod? Is the brave young radical who writes about earthbound clods, emphasizing their dull inexpressiveness—is he, to himself, dull and inarticulate and earthbound? He is not. He is an ex¬ceptional person. He is so excep¬tional that dullness fascinates him. He is so expressive that inarticulate¬ness has a news value for him. My professional code boils down to about this: The novelist should give his work form and structure enough to make it intelligible to others than himself. He should write at his own level, neither up nor down. He should not flinch from giving himself away. He should irate at higher value the experience which, in the natural course of things, comes his way than that experience which he has gone looking for. He should not overrate the importance of ideas. He should not despise his char¬acters. He should try to make every word and act of his characters con¬cretely true, and let universality alone, for nothing ever was universal that began by trying to be.